Thursday, 19 November 2015

[news] Jolla financial difficulties, employees laid off

Translated news via Aamulehti, Finland

Tampere, Finland, November 19, 2015: Jolla in economic difficulties, more than half of the employees laid off.

News was originally shared in Finnish by Aamulehti and confirmed by Juhani Lassila, Jolla Oy.

[news] Jolla financial difficulties, employees laid off

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Local Finnish newspaper Aamulehti, Tampere, Finland published the article below this morning:

"Based on information received by the Aamulehti from a variety of sources, Sailfish OS operating system developer Jolla Oy has plunged into financial difficulties. The company will therefor start extensive lay-offs, which are informed today.

More than a hundred employees have been working for Jolla. Juhani Lassila, Head of Communications at Jolla, confirms that more than half of the employees have to be laid off. According to Lassila, delivery of Jolla tablet devices to customers is intended to ensure, despite the difficulties. Lay-offs does not include the key persons.

"We inform about the changes in the economic situation soon. We have been going on with a round of financing, which was supposed to expire in November. It has had delays", says Lassila.

For the years 2014-2015 Jolla has had four payment default entries for a total amount of approximately EUR 10 000.

Entries were charged by Intrum Justitia [collector], the Unemployment Insurance Fund [governmental fund] and the Suomen perintätoimisto [collector]. According to the payment default registry, the fees were collected except for one: Decrease of 500 Euro for the year 2014 for unemployment insurance fund is still outstanding.

Head of Communications at Jolla, Juhani Lassila, says that he is not aware of payment defaults."

Original article by Taneli Koponen, Aamulehti
Translated to English by Simo Ruoho, Review Jolla

Editorial

Considering such a large lay-offs in a software company, we are looking at a situation where only the essential parts to keep the software alive are expected to be left in house.

First offices to drop would without any doubt be everything hardware related like design and customer services (excluding required personnel to handle warranty cases), the marketing team, the software design team and the testing team. This is, of course, speculation, and it continues:

Last parts to hold onto would obviously be a bug fixing and coding team, the legal department and the key personnel to handle the financial issues, hopefully to be solved later. Antti Saarnio has said on September that Jolla would need another big partner within the next 6 months (additional to Intex).

For the Sailors under lay-offs, and for the community, this is of course sad news. There are now a lot of people looking forward for new opportunities, and those active in community are balancing between staying in as supporting Sailfish OS or moving on. The issue that Sailfish OS isn't open sourced yet might play a role in engaging the community as well.

What's your plan? Standing up and shouting out loud for the future of Sailfish OS, saying "I told you so", or silently moving on?

12 comments:

Sad, but not surprising. I am not a developer, so I don't bother so much about open source as other Jolla users do. I like Sailfish UI and I want to support an OS like this, non-Google and non-Apple. A European smartphone, safe and sustainable, that's what I am looking for. Nowadays community-driven companies are fashionable and I have my doubts about this, because internet communities are vulnerable, too free. With one click you can opt out. Community 'members' cannot be held responsible. Can they? If they can, than where were the developers who made stunning apps and games for Jolla, so nice that everyone wants them? Jolla as a company started with too high ideals and too much 'halleluja-talk', heroing their captain. That is not enough for a healthy financial basis. I don't blame Jolla for not being entirely open source, because I am not a tech. The idea is nice, but should not be a dogma.

As said, sad but not surprising. Can't support them enymore even if wanted to, since unimployed myself also now (didn't work at Jolla tough ;) ) but at least they got my money for 64Gb tablet + Lastu case, no matter will it be delivered or not and I quess that's fine by me. That's the only support I can give by now.

I do hope that people will buy lot of Intex Aquafish phones and SailfishOS will stay alive and be that unlike alternative in the future also in many other manufacturers device also.

This might be a culture related misunderstanding, so to clear out: In Finland, there are only two types of lay-offs: "for now" or "time limited (max 90 days)". Aamulehti did not clearly point out which one is it in this case, but in general the article gives more an impression of a "for now" case.

In Finland, when an employee is on lay-off (on either case), the employment contract is not terminated, but he/she is not obligated to work for the employer, and does not get his/her salary.

Often employees on lay-off (especially on "for now" cases) are looking forward for other job opportunities even that they are not actually fired, and they are also allowed to work for others in the meanwhile. If the financial situation (condition of the lay-off) gets better, employer calls employees back to work by their valid contract, if not terminated by the employee or the employer during the lay-off.

I wonder if Jolla Oy didn't lose money on each tablet. In this case the too good result of the Indiegogo campaign (about 480% from the requested amount) could have killed the company. May anybody ask Jolla Oy about this?

Terrible that employees and their families should suffer like this, especially considering it's Christmas in less than a month. I know this is "only" a temporary lay-off but as they say, there's no smoke without fire. The Jolla sailboat is burning.

One thing i never understood is why Jolla make hardware when their most important thing is the OS, the only thing that is different and beautiful compared to other OSes. If they would concentrate to follow a bussines model like Cyanogen, the story would be different. Long live Jolla!

I stay with Jolla and I am going to order the Jolla Tablet. After Jolla mobile I am aware this is last option to replace my old Nokia with something attractive and something that care for me as a customer and my privacy. Financial troubles are quite common in business world. And collapse of Jolla has been announced many many time so far. Hence I can wait even some more weeks or even months for my device. Jolla was able to built a new device from scratch within a month or two, so is able to deal with current problems. Nothing unusual I think.

I do not agree, because there are not many totally open source products that are really succesful. In SourceForge there are about 130.000 products and only a few hundred did work. If it is a product that many people want, if it is useful, then, maybe...but honestly spoken, many open source lovers just want to be able to hack their device.